by San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis

SPRING SYMPOSIUM: MAGGIE NELSON IN CONVERSATION WITH FRANCISCO GONZÁLEZ

Saturday, Apr 11, 2026 | 10:00am – 12:00pm

SFCP
444 Natoma St., San Francisco, CA 94103
and on Zoom

Join acclaimed writer and critic Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and On Freedom, and psychoanalyst Francisco González, for an expansive conversation exploring the resonances between their work and the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis.

Nelson’s writing is celebrated for its intellectual daring and ability to keep thought open, courting complexity and fostering deep reflection without dissolution into relativism.

Expect a lively and wide-ranging conversation between these bold and subtle thinkers. They will reflect on writing and psychoanalysis as un/related practices, and explore questions of sex and intimacy, desire and ethics, fantasy and form, attachment and freedom, and what it means to stay with ambiguity while rigorously engaging the psychic, bodily, relational, and collective social dimensions of our lives.

Maggie Nelson is an acclaimed writer, poet, and critic known for her genre-bending work that blends memoir, cultural criticism, theory, and poetry. Her books, including The Argonauts, On Freedom, Bluets, and The Art of Cruelty, explore identity, sexuality, desire, art, and cultural life with rigorous intellectual inquiry and lyrical precision. The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award and has become a landmark work of contemporary autotheory. Nelson holds a Ph.D. in English literature and is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her work has been recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other honors.

Francisco J. González, M.D., is a psychoanalyst, teacher, and writer, affiliated with PINC and NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He serves on several editorial boards and was on the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality. He practices privately in San Francisco and Oakland and in the public domain at Instituto Familiar de la Raza in San Francisco.

Register here!

READ ON FOR A REVIEW OF MAGGIE NELSON’S LATEST BOOK
by Mara Gerson, Psy.D.

I read Maggie Nelson’s book Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (2025), in anticipation of her upcoming talk at SFCP this April. As Nelson retells the story of trying to find a cure for her mysterious jaw aches during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she examines her mouth both as literal object and as metaphor. Vulnerability surfaces as she tries relentlessly to find a doctor to relieve her jaw pain. It surfaces again as she shares details of her writing process with a colleague who laughs in her face, and again as she observes her lips move on a screen while she lectures on Zoom. Nelson suggests that orality and the oral tradition are inextricably linked: to speak aloud reveals our dependencies. Thinking of Freud, she writes, “It is not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream–the words you choose, the risks you take in externalizing your mind.”

And Nelson owns this risk. By peppering in psychoanalytic theory, her voice lies somewhere between patient and analyst. Theory offers a degree of self-protection: I am in my experience, and I am also out of it. I know what I’m doing, and I also know that I don’t. Yet Nelson integrates psychoanalysis with such lightness and authenticity that it doesn’t feel like armour. She makes theory feel fresh and artful–not an easy task.

Nelson is conflicted about investigating other people’s mouths with the same degree of scrutiny as she does her own. “It feels intrusive and mean,” she writes, “and also like bad karma, if I don’t want anyone looking at mine.” This made me reconsider the ethics of psychoanalytic writing, particularly when it comes to revealing the intimate details of patients’ lives. Recently, I read two articles in which patients “talk back” to therapists who wrote about them. This made me skeptical of case writing altogether, and inspired me to think twice about my own participation in it. In some ways, autotheory (the genre Nelson helped to pioneer) offers a solution. Many contemporary psychoanalysts have drawn on autotheory to soften the blow of their authorial voice. But as therapists, personal narrative can also be treacherous. Rather than write about our patients, perhaps the goal might be to help patients write about themselves–if not literally, then figuratively. To help patients craft a language they can use to talk about what’s going on inside their mouths.